“SEO” stands for search engine optimization and is among the most important marketing tools for any growing business that wants to improve their presence and increase revenue online. The purpose of search engine optimization is to optimize your website content and code in order for it to rank highly on search engines like Google or Bing. By implementing a successful SEO strategy, Google will begin to favorably rank your website and feature your content on search engine results pages — as you climb to the top — you will see a steady increase of organic user traffic over time!

When effectively implementing a successful SEO strategy, you’ll be able to increase the amount of traffic that reaches your website through search engine results that are truly organic. SEO is a very complex and evolving effort that must be maintained if you want to see consistent results. Those that properly maintain their SEO efforts will be rewarded with increased traffic to their website, which means that you’ll gain more leads, more sales, and a greater brand reputation.

The seven most common ways that SEO can help your business grow are detailed in the following, all of which you should begin to notice soon after you’ve started to implement SEO best practices into your website.

1. SEO Helps Increase Traffic to Your Website

Likely the best aspect of implementing an effective SEO strategy is that it will help increase the amount of users (aka prospective customers) that visit your business’s website. When you start to appear towards the top of Google search engine results pages (SERPS) for searches and search phrases that are related to your business, you will begin to see a higher number of users and more traffic coming to your website, which means that there will be more chances for you to convert the initial traffic into customers who will purchase your products and/or services.

Higher customer conversion rates will turn into more sales and better qualified leads. Whether you’ve just recently obtained an online presence by creating the first website for your business or have never used SEO before to grow your online presence, search engine optimization will pay dividends as you attempt to grow both your brand and business.

2. SEO Builds Brand Reputation Online

When you begin your SEO efforts, you’ll also find that it helps to build your online brand’s reputation. When customers enter a search term and find that your website is among the first listed within the search results, these customers will likely trust that your website is a representation of a reputable and successful business. The greater visibility for your website means that there will also be greater trust in the eyes of your customers as an established brand. When multiple search keywords lead to your website, your brand awareness should start to spike.

The best aspect of maintaining SEO efforts to bolster your brand reputation is that it’s among the few ways to increase brand awareness without spending a substantial sum of money (compared to traditional advertising). When you start to outperform your main competitors in search results, your brand may begin to be seen as an industry leader, which is a position that you can maintain with consistent search engine optimization. By implementing a few simple SEO techniques, you may be able to push customers who were previously unaware of your brand towards eventually having your brand at the top of their mind whenever they think about the product you sell or the service you offer.

3. SEO Helps Refine Your Online Business Strategy

Customer engagement is essential if you want your company’s reputation to continue to improve. Customers who see that their opinions are being listened to may view your business in a better light, which is something that SEO can help with. By optimizing your website to user search queries and related keyword phrases that prospective customers are most interested in, you’re essentially responding to user’s questions and interests by providing them with the information they’re seeking. By creating content around your user’s search queries and needs, you are positioning your business to answer these questions and craft a better sales strategy for your business through a website that more closely meets the needs of your customer base.

Customers who see your website towards the top of search engine rankings for a phrase or keyword that they are interested in are not only more likely to do business with you but will also believe that your business can provide exactly what they are looking for. There are a wide range of marketing techniques that can help your online business grow, most of which can be very costly to implement — with an effective SEO campaign, you’re able to potentially avoid these costs for a more effective online business strategy.

4. SEO Improves the Performance of Your Website

While the primary benefits of SEO are the ones that provide you with an increase in customers and leads, another fantastic benefit from SEO is that it will improve the performance of your website, which should help enhance the experience that visitors have when browsing your website. A couple of the key facets of search engine optimization are aimed at providing your website with user experience optimization which includes — performance optimization. By improving various aspects of performance on your website, you will be working at making your website load faster, which will assure a pleasant user experience. These performance efforts of an effective SEO campaign will also help you look for and resolve any usability issues throughout the site while also making the website more user friendly.

All of these aspects work together to increase your chances at converting a user into a return customer while boosting your search engine results page rankings. Google’s sophisticated search algorithm can identify whether a website provides users with a good experience or a poor one, and website performance is a key signal to Google that your content is worth ranking on its search engine results pages. You need to be able to provide your customers with what they’re looking for in just a few clicks — If you’re able to do so, you’ll be provided with an increase in traffic, customers, and conversion rates, all of which will help to propel your brand and business to new heights!

5. SEO Provides Customer Insight

The success of any business depends primarily on how well they are able to satisfy the needs of their customers. The problem with this is that it can sometimes be extremely difficult to understand what needs the customer has. If you want to gain better insight into your customers, SEO is one way to do so. When you’re optimizing your website, with the analytics software of your choice, look for gaps in performance on certain high traffic pages or important pages in the sales funnel, which is something that’s typically indicated by user dropoff numbers or low conversion rates.

If you notice areas of your website that aren’t being visited often or aren’t performing well, it’s essential that you attempt to improve these portions of your site. By looking at these areas of improvement, you’ll be able to see what your customer’s pain points are, which will then allow you to optimize your website in a manner that better meets the needs of your customers. Doing so will give you highly valuable business information to better position your brand online. If you know what your customers want, you can focus heavily on delivering exactly that with your website.

6. SEO Allows You to Increase Engagement With Your Customers

Today’s customer needs a more personalized experience when using a brand or website, which means that you need to find ways to increase engagement with these customers. A strong ranking signal for Google that allows them to identify whether or not your website should be highly ranked is the amount of time that users spend on page and how they engage with your content. If visitors to your website browse for a short period of time before leaving without really clicking on any additional pages or spending a large amount of time in one area of the website, it’s likely that you’re not engaging with customers like you should be, which is an issue that can be solved through the efforts of your SEO campaign. Part of any SEO campaign should consider and optimize high visibility areas of the site to increase time on page and user engagement, boosting your search engine rankings and ultimately — traffic.

Customer engagement is how users interact with the content on your website, which can occur through submission forms or click-through to other pages on your site. When a user is truly engaged in what you offer, they will fill out forms for membership to a site newsletter or spend their time searching through numerous pages of your website. By providing valuable content that your visitors want to read and by engaging with your visitors in a way that satisfies them, you increase the likelihood that they will become a customer who will return to your website again and again. Once you know how to do this, it’s likely that you will better understand the needs of your customers and expand your connection with your customer base beyond the website.

7. SEO Provides Benefits for Years to Come

To understand just how beneficial SEO can be, it’s important that you consider how long-lasting the increased traffic and brand visibility benefits can be. Once you begin your SEO efforts, your website will be better positioned to rank for both current and future content, which means that you can reap the rewards of your optimization for years to come. The initial optimization techniques that you employ are likely going to be the most extensive that you’ll need to perform for quite some time while this lays a foundation for future content to rank more quickly once you have gained the trust of search engines like Google or Bing.

By working on a strong SEO foundation, your future content efforts will have a higher probability of ranking, at a quicker pace. Much of your content will likely be evergreen content, which means that the content will always be relevant and prove a valuable resource for your customers for years to come.

The currently ranking articles on your website will also continue to climb (and fall as competitors become more aggressive) organically, which gives you a leg up on the competition. However, it’s important to maintain consistency with your SEO efforts if you really want to maintain your position as a leader in the search engine results pages. Over time, it’s possible for your competition to outrank your business if they happen to increase their SEO efforts while your own have diminished.

Conclusion

An effective and successful SEO campaign not only increases your traffic, but provides a number of other benefits to help your business grow online. Although we’ve been brief in each of the topics in this article, the subject can actually become quite complex and your online marketing efforts (depending on how much effort you’re willing to put into it) can be a game changer for businesses looking to grow revenue and expand their services or product lines to meet the needs of their customers. Today’s software and technology allows us greater insight into our customer needs and successful business practices, refining these practices is only a matter of discipline and effort!

Contact us today if you’d like to chat SEO or have any questions about how you could implement an effective SEO strategy for your business or website!